Newsgroups are a worldwide medium of communication. With the spread of Internet access to many private households, universities and companies, the use of newsgroups has also increased. The question I am working under is whether scientific work is possible in the Usenet.
Studying newsgroups does not turn out to be very easy. On the one hand, there are many of them covering a wide variety of topics, and on the other hand, each newsgroup defines itself and is therefore difficult to compare with others. But of course there are comparable phenomena in almost all groups, which are caused by the structure of the Usenet itself and which have to be examined here.
In this work I have mainly relied on the groups de.etc.sprache.deutsch, sci.psychology.psychotherapy.moderated, sci.math (in short also alt.math.moderated) and sci.physics.research (moderated) in order to be able to compare both humanities and natural science forums. One of the groups is German, the others English. I also found it indispensable to examine moderated as opposed to unmoderated groups in order to be able to point out possible problems of one or the other form.
After I have discussed newsgroups in general and their demands and characteristics, I will talk about the advantages and disadvantages of the main features of this kind of communication, such as the anonymity and the unavoidable publicity. Finally, I will discuss actual Usenet practice, that is, what the reality looks like in this regard.
Quotations from Usenet I always give as a whole post in the following, with exceptions, in order not to mutilate the already out of context posts even more. Additionally, Netscape does not provide a message ID in its postings, but the information in the given header should suffice as a source.
If you want to learn more about this topic, click on this link: what is the protocol used to indicate a usenet newsgroup